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ESPlorer IDE for ESP8266 NodeMCU firmware

ESPlorer IDE for ESP8266

If you are familiar with LUA programming language, then there is an IDE to work with ESP8266, ESPlorer IDE. It is written using java with launcher available for MS Windows platform as well as for Linux. It has lot of features useful when you are developing with ESP8266. This IDE uses serial port to talk to ESP8266. So, you can use the connection that I mentioned in my previous articlewith ESP8266 or use module like NodeMCU board with ESP8266. In this article I am using one such board. See the picture below.

Download the ESPlorer IDE from http://esp8266.ru/esplorer/ mentioned above and launch the executable ESPlorer.bat or directly run the jar file ESPlorer.jar. This will open a nice UI shown below.

If you have connected your ESP8266 to a serial port, you will see it in list of ports at the top. Click the ‘Open’ button. You will see a message like

PORT OPEN 9600

But no other message. Now Reset the ESP8266, you will see the familiar welcome message from ESP8266.

That means, your ESP8266 is ready for your programs.
The firmware present on the device can accept any LUA code on the serial port. Lets try it. There is a small editable dropdown at the bottom which has a button that says Send. It will have list of available functions already defined. Lets try one of them. Select the item =node.heap() and press the Send button. This function will return the free heap space. You will see something like